A Distant Land

by Alison Booth

  ‘He’s already agreed to do it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying “I see”.’

  He pressed his lips together. Perhaps Eileen’s flushed cheeks were because she’d been crying again, just as he had only an hour ago. Curbing a sigh, he decided that it might be better to let her take over everything. It would be her release and he could get on with grieving in his own way. In spite of this he found himself saying, ‘We could always try asking Professor Smyth.’

  ‘Professor Smyth?’

  ‘Yes. He’s the one who encouraged Jim to enter for the Rhodes Scholarship.’

  ‘We don’t want him then. If Jim had stayed in Australia, he’d still be alive. Anyway, I’ve already asked the Reverend Cannadine and he’s accepted.’

  It’s done and dusted, he thought, and I have no say in the matter. He stood up, and in his haste to get away he almost knocked over the chair. ‘I’ve got to wash my hands,’ he mumbled.

  He shut the laundry door behind him and turned the tap on hard. He didn’t wash his hands though; he just stood there clutching the side of the concrete tub. It was all he could do not to shout. What a relief it would have been to bellow at Eileen, to yell out ‘He was my son too’. Yet there was no point getting angry with her. What he was feeling was simply a reaction to all the pain. Perhaps he’d never get used to the fact that his home and his life were changed forever.

  Nothing would ever be the same again.

  Afterwards, when tea was over, he remembered the cigar box of Jim’s treasures hidden away in the garage. It had appeared on the top shelf when Jim was ten or eleven, when he would have had to stand on something to reach that high. Of course George had seen the box right away, imperfectly concealed behind half-used tins of paint; he knew the location of everything in the garage, even though it did look a bit of a tip. Yet he’d always maintained the fiction that he hadn’t noticed the box, and had even put more tins of paint in front of it, to protect Jim’s secret.

  Over the years Jim had continued to use the box. Once George had come into the garage when Jim was putting something into it but he’d backed out again quickly, pretending that he hadn’t observed his son standing in the shadows.

  Now George removed the tins of paint and pulled out the cigar box. You could just leave it here unopened, he thought. Leave it here forever. And yet he desperately wanted to see what was inside. He desperately wanted to have a piece of his son. Something tangible, rather than these memories that haunted him day and night. You should open it, he decided at last. Gently he released the lid. Inside were some pieces of folded newspaper and a few rocks.

  He unfolded the first of the newspaper clippings. It was about the radio telescope at Parkes. This had been a shared obsession between father and son over the years, and yet they’d never visited it together. The second was far older, a cutting about the US Navy ship sunk during the Second World War by the Japs off the south coast. George remembered Jim pouncing on that when his mother had been clearing out old newspapers lining some drawers.

  George folded up the clippings again and took out of the box the three rocks. Not ordinary rocks at all but some of the fossils that Jim had found under Jingera headland years ago. As George put them back, he noticed in the bottom of the box a tarnished brass badge, with the rising sun above the imperial crown. His heart lurched. He’d given this to Jim years ago, and the boy had kept it. It was a relic from the Second World War, a relic from George’s time in the military when he’d been stationed in the Northern Territory after the bombing of Darwin. He picked up the badge and rubbed it against his sleeve. For a moment he thought of putting it in his pocket, to keep with him always, a part of his son and a part of himself. Then he dismissed this impulse. It was better by far to keep the badge in the box, on the shelf, behind the half-used tins of paint.

  A memorial to his son.

  Chapter 17

  Zidra was sitting in the living room trying to concentrate on the words of the book that lay open on her lap. They might have been in another language, these meaningless squiggles arranged in neat lines across the paper. A trapezium of sunlight shifted slowly across the Persian rug as the minutes passed by, and occasionally the grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. When she heard the crunch of tyres on gravel, she stood and peered out the window: Mama was home from Jingera at last.

  After she’d come inside, Zidra’s mother said, ‘A postcard from Lorna. She’s definitely coming to the memorial service and she’ll stay here a couple of nights. And there’s an envelope for you, darling. A thick one, from Paddington. Joanne said she’d forward your post on to you.’

  Without enthusiasm Zidra opened the envelope. There were some smaller envelopes inside: a bill, cards from friends and, last of all, an airmail envelope with Jim’s spiky handwriting scrawled across it.

  A voice from the dead. The shock of it took her breath away. She threw down the cards and bill and ran upstairs with Jim’s envelope. After ripping it open, she pulled out two pages of airmail paper:

  My dear Zidra,

  There was something I wanted to tell you that night I came to dinner at Ferndale but the right opportunity never presented itself. And now I’m sitting on the plane flying from Sydney to Saigon and struggling to think of the appropriate words to use. Perhaps I should pick the simplest. I’ve been in love with you for years.

  Zidra took a deep breath. I’ve been in love with you for years. Abruptly she sat down at her desk. Her hands were trembling so much that she lost her grip on the letter and it fell to the floor. She snatched it up and continued reading:

  Why have I waited so long to tell you? I don’t really know. When you started at university, I was in third year and you were a fresher and you looked so youthful and so innocent, and I thought that you were much too young to begin a serious entanglement. Too young for permanency. We were both too young for that. Soon after Lindsay turned up, and I never meant to hurt you with that relationship, although I suspect you were hurt, and I knew right from the start that it wasn’t serious. Then I got the Rhodes Scholarship. Yes, of course, I know I had to apply to get it so I had thought of leaving Australia, but I never imagined I’d be successful. And by then, at the end of your first year, you’d become the darling of everyone in men’s college. They all lusted after you – did you even notice? Although from what I heard you lusted after several of them yourself. Then I left Australia but I never stopped loving you, never stopped hoping that some day we could get together.

  Dearest Zidra, I love you and I would like to marry you. I know you often say you don’t want marriage, but I hope you’ll consider it. I’ll take that human-rights job and come back to Sydney if you think there is even some possibility that you might love me. You don’t have to give me a decision apart from indicating if you might think about us getting together.

  At my most optimistic I think you love me too and not just in a sisterly way. I will never forget that moment in your car the Sunday I arrived back, not even a week ago, when our hands touched, nor will I ever forget that intense look you gave me, and how much I wanted to kiss you. But you glanced away and you put the car into gear, and it was too late. I thought we’d have the whole week in Jingera to talk through these things but it didn’t work out like that. And that was my fault.

  I know you’ve recently become involved with Hank but is that really serious? Although I’ve never met him, I can tell you’re not in love with him. Your voice gave it away when you were talking about him. Perhaps I’m being presumptuous in writing this and maybe even deluded about it. If so, please forgive me, and don’t let it mar our friendship that means so much to me.

  This is my second draft, and the letter’s getting shorter as I peel away the bits that might put pressure on you. The main thing I wanted to say is how much I care for you and that I really want us to live our lives together, and I hope you might come t
o feel this too. If I had any literary talent I would find words to describe your beauty and your kindness and your intelligence and your courage. As it is, I can only write that you make me laugh, you make me weep, you make the sun shine, you bring glory to everything you do. You are the love of my life and you always will be.

  With all my love,

  Jim

  PS I’ve written out a stanza that is all I can remember of a poem I learnt at school, by Judith Wright:

  All things conspire to stand between us –

  even you and I,

  who still command us, still unjoin us,

  and drive us forward till we die.

  Zidra was crying now, fat tears coursing down her cheeks, and she felt her heart would surely crack in two, it was hurting so much. The letter was late, far too late. If only you’d told me before you’d left. If only I’d taken the initiative and kissed you. If only I’d told you how I felt. Too late, too late, too late. You’ll never know how much I loved you.

  After a time she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and splashed her face with cold water from the tap over the corner basin. She read the letter once more. As she looked up from the pages, her vision sharpened and she began to see the room as if for the first time. Everything had meaning: the half-empty glass of water on the bedside table; a tiny spider lowering itself on a filament from the ceiling; the walls that she and her mother had painted gloss white several years ago, walls that were now reflecting radiance into the room from the sinking sun.

  She read Jim’s letter for the third time. As she finished, she realised that a tune was running through her head. It was the song that had been playing on the car radio that Sunday when Jim’s hand had accidentally touched hers: Tina Turner belting out ‘River Deep – Mountain High’. She wept again, deep choking sobs that she muffled into the feather pillow.

  Later she recognised that the certainty of his love would stay with her. This new information would give her strength. There would be no more collapses, or not if she could help it. No more sleeping tablets. And no more being so drugged that the past became lost to her.

  A day later Zidra stood on the footbridge that led over the lagoon and onto Jingera Beach. It had rained earlier. All colour had leached from the landscape. The lagoon water reflected the encircling grey-green trees, stabbed with pallid verticals, and the paler sky. Seagulls hung around the foreshore like teenagers on a Saturday night, with nothing to do, no place to go. Shush – shush went the waves as they fingered the sand at the lagoon’s edge. Give up. Give up your dreams and go home.

  A small bird with a green head hopped near her, then away again. Her grim expression might have dispatched it, or perhaps it was the sudden movement as she wiped her eyes on her forearm. Jim would have known what type of bird it was. Sometimes she’d teased him: ‘Jim Cadwallader, the walking encyclopedia, you know the names of everything’.

  You knew the names of everything.

  Searching the landscape for a distraction from her grief, she noticed that the poles supporting the jetty had been recently painted. How she hated that white paint. Would progress leave nothing alone? It was the same thing with the cottage in which she and her mother had lived when they’d first moved to Jingera. It had been done up recently. The weatherboards had been painted cream and the window frames and verandah posts a dark green. She resented the owners for destroying the past. Did time have to alter everything?

  She sighed deeply. No matter how hard she tried, it was impossible to forget that tomorrow was the day of the memorial service.

  Such an awful finality.

  Once it was over, Jim was as good as buried, even though there was no body, just a few handfuls of ashes scattered somewhere on Cambodian soil. One day, when the war was over, she would travel to the area where he’d died, and there she would conduct her own commemoration. But in the meantime there was the Jingera service to get through. She hoped she would be able to perform, without breaking, the reading she’d promised the Cadwalladers. ‘Read something Jim loved,’ Mrs Cadwallader had said. ‘You knew him like one of the family. You’ll know what to choose.’

  Although she’d decided right away what to pick, she didn’t know if she would have the strength to read it in its entirety. She took from her trouser pocket the piece of paper on which she’d written the words. Silently she read them once more. Then she took a deep breath, pulled back her shoulders and began to proclaim the words: to the bush, to the seagulls, to all those places around the lagoon that she and Jim had shared.

  Her memories of these places would survive as long as she did.

  Chapter 18

  George sat next to Eileen on the front pew. They were early. Immediately behind them were the Vincents and Lorna Hunter, whom George hadn’t seen for years. St Matthew’s Church was small and rapidly filling up, with people and notes from the organ that Daphne Dalrymple was playing.

  When Zidra and Lorna had greeted George just moments before, he’d been shocked at Zidra’s appearance. Her face was caked with make-up. Bright-red lipstick and so much foundation that it would crack if she were to grimace. A mask behind which you could only guess at what was happening.

  Some minutes into the service, it was time for Zidra’s reading. George watched her walk slowly to the pulpit and climb the few steps. A remote young woman in her prime and a sleeveless black linen dress with white stitching around the neckline. She looked around the church, her face impassive, as if she were searching for someone, or perhaps it was only for silence. The organ music stopped and Daphne Dalrymple rested her hands on her lap. Zidra cleared her throat, took a sip of water from the glass in front of her and began to speak. She’d chosen, she said, a poem by Judith Wright that Jim had loved, and that he’d sent to her the week before he died:

  All things conspire to hold me from you –

  even my love,

  since that would mask you and unname you

  till merely woman and man we live.

  All men wear arms against the rebel;

  and they are wise,

  since the sound world they know and stable

  is eaten away by lovers’ eyes.

  All things conspire to stand between us –

  even you and I,

  who still command us, still unjoin us,

  and drive us forward till we die.

  Not till those fiery ghosts are laid

  shall we be one.

  Till then, they whet our double blade

  and use the turning world for stone.

  Zidra read it slowly, and apparently calmly, each word carefully articulated. Dry eyed, she exhibited a startling self-control. It was this that finally eroded George’s own composure, and tears began to stream down his face. Surreptitiously he dried his eyes on his cuff and passed his clean handkerchief to Eileen. She needed it more than he did; her own dainty square was now a sopping mess, which he took from her and slipped into his pocket. Zidra, having finished her reading, walked the short distance back from the pulpit with her head held high. As she passed by, her eyes met his; something slipped into place and he recognised the pain she was battling to conceal.

  The words of the unfamiliar service eddied around him, shifting him hither and thither, until he was beached on an unexpected silence. Only when Daphne Dalrymple began punishing the organ again, and Eileen nudged him sharply, did he realise what was required of him. Struggling to his feet with the rest of the congregation, he fought to find the right hymn. Flip-flip-flip through the impossible pages of the hymn book, his fingers not belonging to him; he might never have located the chosen words if Eileen hadn’t done it for him. Only by the last verse was he ready to join in, ready to sing with the rest of the flock, ‘I’ll fear not what men say, I’ll labour night and day, To be a pilgrim.’

  After the final chord, the Reverend Cannadine was off again, pr
eaching of God’s will and some other stuff that George chose not to listen to. Instead he concentrated on the more important shaft of sunlight that was illuminating the white and green floral arrangement under the pulpit, imbuing it with a significance that he struggled to comprehend. If only he could understand that, he might be able to grasp the meaning of Jim’s too early death.

  In the meantime the padre’s words flowed around the column of light that was perceptibly shifting.

  Finally it became impossible for George to avoid noticing Eileen, who was leaning forward the better to catch Cannadine’s precious words. To distract himself, George started reciting under his breath the hymn he knew she’d chosen for the end of the service: ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want . . .’

  Yet how wrong that was for, in spite of his prayer, he was wanting. He was wanting his son. His son whom he would never see again.

  Now Eileen jabbed him in the ribs, none too gently. Blinking, he focused again on the padre chap. At last he seemed to have finished his religious ministrations, and George’s attention was caught by the cherished words: ‘James Cadwallader’.

  ‘We are gathered together today in remembrance of the precious life of James Cadwallader, who grew up in this town.’ Cannadine looked down at the notes that Eileen had provided for him, and which he’d spread out on the lectern in front of him. Of course he’d be speaking from the script and not the heart, for how could it be from the heart when he’d never known Jim? In spite of George’s anguish – and the detached part of his brain that was objectively analysing the words of this Cannadine chap for whom his wife had for years had a thing – he felt a glow of pride. Scholarships from aged eleven, a distinguished academic record, a brilliant career in the making, his first book nearly written, his independent reporting on the war in Indochina appearing in newspapers and wire services throughout the world. Nonetheless James Cadwallader was always modest, always affectionate, always brave even in the face of the extraordinary dangers that men and women foreign correspondents faced every day of their lives when reporting from war zones. Brave also in informing the world about what was really happening in this war, in which Australia and New Zealand should never have got involved.